 | The Weblog Awards are LudacrisBy Grace Chu |
There is something about discussing politics on the internet that turns rational human beings into feral creatures that are only one echelon higher in the evolutionary ladder than common New York City subway rats. These rabid critters are only capable of typing the following words: “MOONBAT!” “PAULTARD!” “WINGNUT!” “OBOT!” and of course, the catch-all staple, “ASSHAT!” This is why Grace The Spot prefers to post about topics like Britney Spears and Alice from The Brady Bunch. No one will ever accuse us of being wingnut asshats from the Paultard neighborhood of Moonbatville if we stick to talking about Brit Brit, Sam Ronson, and LiLo (although some of us may be considered Obots in real life).
The political blogosphere (i.e. the loosely-knit community of blogs that blog about politics) is about as stable as the Middle East. The longer you play there, the probability of being hit by a Scud missile approaches one. (Yes, I know Scud missiles are so 1991, but flannel seems to be making a comeback, so I don’t see why Scud missiles can’t also be trendy again. Okay, I kid. I kid. War isn’t funny, except in the case of Tropic Thunder – oh, and the War on Drugs, which is one of the longest running jokes in history.)
The Weblog Awards may seem like a kind and gentle competition among affable geeks to the uninitiated, when in fact it is a free-for-all among not-so-affable geeks that often includes unlikely alliances formed behind the scenes, ne’er-do-wells attempting to circumvent anti-cheat mechanisms in the voting script, trash talking and general keyboard thuggery.
When you mix the already hypercompetitive nature of the awards with the inherent batshit craziness of the political blogosphere, things can get ugly, and little blogs like us who generally steer clear of incendiary topics can get caught up in the mudslinging between the 800 pound gorillas of the political blogosphere. Since Jon Swift has already been kind enough to explain what is going on with Wonkette vs. the world, I will simply cut and paste from his post:
Wonkette’s original goal was to defeat The Confluence, which was winning in its category of Best Liberal Blog. The Confluence is a PUMA blog, which are blogs written by bitter and angry former Hillary Clinton supporters who are still getting used to the idea of having a black man in the White House. (PUMA either stands for “Party Unity My Ass” or “People Unable to Mitigate their Anger,” depending on whom you ask.) Now I understand that there are many people who disagree with PUMAs, but haven’t they suffered enough? Hillary lost and one day they are going to figure that out. I think we should give them a little time to adjust. Just as my grandmother learned to say “colored,” they’ll come around. And who knows, maybe Larry Johnson at No Quarter will find that “whitey” tape he seems to have mislaid, at least in time for the next election. Who will be laughing then?
But as Wonkette soared past the other blogs in its category, it became tipsy with power and began targeting other PUMA blogs in other categories and it didn’t care who got hurt in the process. Soon other categories had its carpets dirtied by Wonkette’s mud-splattered wretches. In Best New Blog, the Wonketeers randomly selected a blog, ~synthesis~, which I must say is a very fine blog, and got their legions of readers, who apparently have a lot of time on their hands, to vote for it, in order to defeat UppityWoman08, but at the same time making it virtually impossible for other blogs to win. Can you imagine how these young blogs must have felt, still gaining their sea-legs in the blogosphere, happy to be recognized for their efforts with a nomination, only to have their hopes dashed and get a sad lesson in nasty blogospheric politics? My friend Blue Gal tells me, for example, that Grace the Spot, which I think is a Lebanese blog, is a very deserving blog in that category, and it was doing quite well until Wonkette struck. Grace is understandably not happy with what she called Wonkette’s “spiteful shenanigans.”
And so I’d like to take this opportunity to dedicate the following song to Wonkette. Please turn your baseball caps backwards and put your hands in the air. And wave them like you just don’t care. (Most likely NSFW.)
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January 8th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
SO I GUESS IF THE WONKETTES ARE CHEATERS THEN THAT PUTS US IN SECOND RIGHT?
January 8th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
hot damn why do people always gotta be takin pictures of me when I am just trying to enjoy some f*cking cake?!?
even though I am slightly infatuated with Ana Marie Cox, her old blog home IS A HO!
January 8th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Grace the Spot WOULD be in first if Wonkette had endorsed her instead of um, what they called this “cool named” blog synthesis. Actually, this is a juvenile effort by Wonkette to skew the results in several categories, the weirdest of which is Best Comic Strip, which is right up the infantile wonkette alley.
The weird thing is that Wonkettes refused to endorse the Black Sphere, which Tuesday was running in 2nd, closely followed by Grace. Could any woman be endorsed by Wonkettes…are you kidding?
I’ve read your great comments to awards officials, Grace. Don’t count on them taking any action though to protect the integrity of the awards themselves. Ironic, that. Uppity Woman would have won without Wonkette gaming the system. Shrug. She finds humor in it. I don’t.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Actually Haley, the Comic Strip endorsement is based on the individual they have do a weekly contribution to their blog (Comics Curmudgeon). That is a pretty clear connection to draw for vote support. Same thing with Rumprost, which Wonkette has linked to before, and FiveThirtyEight for Political Coverage, which the editors very often link.
As for the votes and the calls of cheating (which really began with The Confluence after they lost the lead), there is something to be said for the amount of traffic Wonkette generates. Wonkette still gets some significant cross-links from Gawker, their former owners. If you go and look at its traffic, it blows away The Confluence, who originally had an organized GOTV effort from their site. It is expected that if the editors ask for people to vote, Wonkette has a large pool to draw from.
Indeed, Wonkette has always had a very large reading base within Washington, DC, typically amongst the 20-30 demographic, including a large swath of liberal Hill staffers. Many of them, myself included, vote from work, from home and will get their office coworkers to vote, too. Wonkette has a pretty long history of getting ridiculous online turnout going – the EcoDriving challenge a few weeks back is one example where several hundred to a thousand played a simple game for a few minutes and got the Wonkette team way in the lead.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
yeah i read wonkette from time to time. funny stuff. i liked their coverage “last week’s shots” or whatever it was about drunken rich kids in d.c.
but come on… picking some random site in “best new blog” without actually reading the content just to shut down some site whose politics they don’t agree with? this means that any large-traffic blog can skew the entire contest for any reason whatsoever, and it takes away from the integrity of the contest.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Well, the small blog category may be the strongest case against Wonkette’s methods as it offers no clear connection for the Wonkette editors for their endorsement. However, this is the problem with the contest as a whole – it is too easy to have any blog arbitrarily create a slate of blogs to pick using any criteria they want and utilize their fan base to drive the vote. Wonkette is the first to do it with this degree of effectiveness, but theoretically any of the larger blogs (TPM or the Politico blogger for example) could mobilize a much larger fan base if it exercised its power to do so.
So, while you may disagree with Wonkette throwing its fan weight around, I fail to see how it is their fault for doing it, besides it not benefitting the individuals affected by it. Is there something in the rules that defines the specific criteria by which a voter must choose the “best” blog? What is the check on that? Best is a vague term, open to all sorts of subjectivity. Even had Wonkette not done it this way, there is no guarantee that the voters would have not chosen just as arbitrary of criteria as Wonkette did. Surely you don’t hold the “average” voter to that level of idealism.
It is a fatal flaw of any sort of online polling. I am sure you are familiar with Ron Paul’s exceptional ability to dominate the entire GOP field in any online poll that was done. This is a flaw in the system, and why online polls are concerned ineffective at capturing any sort of true representation of readers’ sentiments.
I think this should more serve as a lesson for the future awards process. Instead of opening up the polling to a situation like this, a panel of judges should be devised that have no connections to these blogs, represent a wide swath of the blogosphere and they rule on nominations submitted by fans. The Bloggies do it in this manner and they just opened up their nominations. Arguably it is a less-imperfect system than this present one.
My personal interpretation of why Wonkette does this is because it takes the piss out of it, just like it does to all sorts of things. Wonkette is all about making fun of any and everything, knocking things down to size and exploiting the fact that some people take things far too seriously. Wonkette may take itself a little bit too haphazardly with this as some people take it somewhat seriously, but as your New Year’s Resolutions option on the side says, “I will not be overly competitive about things that do not matter.” Wonkette isn’t being competitive for competitiveness’s sake, it is doing it to highlight how serious some people take an arbitrary and flawed blog award.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
I apologize, I missed the “reply to this comment button” and just did a generic reply.
January 8th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
First time on this site! Came here from The Confluence. Nice site BTW.
I just wanted to reply to NotAnEvilLobbyist’s comment.
The reason the Confluence (Who did NOT have an organized GOTV BTW) began to complain about cheating was because some of their commenters went over to Wonkette and found this posted there, on Jan 5, the day the polls opened. (it has been scrubbed since).
This is another gem from Wonkette:
January 8th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Wait, are you saying that after the most closely followed election in this nation’s history, a political blog lost 20% of its traffic? Say it ain’t so! The loss in traffic is not unique to Wonkette, or to any other political blog – FiveThirtyEight, for example, has been struggling. The spin off of Wonkette occurred quite some time ago, back in April I think. The traffic going through Wonkette was very high due to the election, but now, just like almost all other political blogs, traffic is dropping some. As a personal anecdote, I used to visit FiveThirtyEight about ten times a day, now I visit once every few. That is typical of this post-election deflation.
And when I say organized GOTV campaign, I mean they came out with a list of partnered blogs to support fairly early on, asking for solidarity amongst their commenters. Sorry for not defining that clearly.
And as for the post about the supposed cheating instructions, that A. was not sanctioned by Wonkette, but written by one of its commenters, and B. the editors never endorsed it (and you call its deletion scrubbing, maybe the editors felt it was wrong to do so and deleted it? Simple explanations are sometimes lost when nefarious intentions are assumed to be driving actions.). Mezilla is not an editor but a free to log-in commenter who posted something on his own. I would like you to point out where the editors of Wonkette posted instructions to cheat. I will wait..go ahead, find it…(hint: it only exists in accusations from The Confluence followers.).
ManchuCandidate is right – you can vote a million times – just go find a million computers. It is computers that count as votes, not people, in this poll. Once more, that is a flaw with the poll, and a flaw with online polling period.
January 8th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
NotAnEvilLobbyist mentioned RonPaul, a commenter at the Confluence mentioned just now that : ( January 8th, 2009 at 4:00 pm)
” Ron Paul supporters got the Wonkette warblog treatment during the primaries. If you think what they’re saying about you is bad, you should check out some of their coverage of the “Paultards.” It was pretty vicious and lasted for months. ”
I would really like to know just who is manipulating all those self styled piss- artists at Wanktard.
January 8th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
from the free online dictionary, first definition:
best (bst)
adj. Superlative of good.
1. Surpassing all others in excellence, achievement, or quality
choosing something based on the first thing one pulls from one’s rectum does not lead to choosing the “best” of anything even if “best” is a vague term.
“I will not be overly competitive about things that do not matter.”
that’s from the SLL portion of our blog, as are the rest of the resolutions. we lesbians can’t help it. none of us expect to keep any of them.
“Wonkette isn’t being competitive for competitiveness’s sake, it is doing it to highlight how serious some people take an arbitrary and flawed blog award.”
that’s bs. wonkette cracks on PUMAs all the time. they did it because they find PUMAs to be ridiculous, just as they find ron paul supporters to be ridiculous. “highlighting how seriously some people take a blog award” didn’t cross their minds. that’s something gawker or radar would do.
even if this contest is stupid and meaningless, you’d have to agree that wonkette’s actions are pretty juvenile and take away from the competitive spirit. the contest has simply become less fun and a lot more “whatever.” i don’t like “whatever.” i like fun. it was cool when all the little blogs could trash talk each other and play around for fun, but when it became clear that this big fat wonkette thing could just come in and wipe us all out for dubious reasons, then we’re all left saying “what’s the point – yeah this IS pretty lame. BORING.” what a buzzkill.
and p.s. you think that posting “you’s a ho” by ludacris = taking things seriously? next time i’ll post some emo or something.
January 8th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Oh, well, Grace, I am not accusing you personally of taking it seriously – you are not in comparison to the way things broke down from The Confluence side. Think Wonkette was trying to steal babies or something. And yes, PUMAs get mocked all of the time, but come on, have you seen some of the material they provide to do so? And trust me, I know lesbians can’t hold their resolutions – us gays are none the better at it
I think it runs in our gay genes.
What are the qualities for excellence? X has an excellent name, therefore it is superior to Y blog. X is the highest quality name there, therefore X is the best, when my rating system consists solely of the purpose of the name. It is vague. It is horribly vague – just like how people voted for Bush because they’d want a beer with him. That is their defining quality, above all others. What is categorically, objectively, wrong with using a different, entirely arbitrary and totally capricious other criteria? There just is nothing to go off of for best.
But, I am leaving work now, and with my firm’s work week, this begins my weekend (4/10 hour days). I enjoyed reading some of your blog posts and I thank you for not resorting to name calling like those commenters in the Confluence did. Or the commenter below did – what is that saying, he who casts the first stone? Oh whatever, my Bible burns if I touch it, so I can’t be bothered. Have a nice weekend.
January 8th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
“and you call its deletion scrubbing, maybe the editors felt it was wrong to do so and deleted it? Simple explanations are sometimes lost when nefarious intentions are assumed to be driving actions.”
Sure-they deleted it after the Confluence found it out.
Menzilla’s instructions were posted on Jan 5-they were found on January 6, when, following a tremendous surge in Wonkette votes some commenters became curious and went over there.
What they found was this gem of fair play:
usual pathetic protowars
January 8th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
You mean you object to being called a self-styled piss artist?
These are your own words:
My personal interpretation of why Wonkette does this is because it takes the piss out of it, just like it does to all sorts of things.
Like I said before-my own personal idea of why Wonkette indulges in pointless protowars is to boost traffic and make money for its owner thru blogads.
January 8th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
okay until 3 days ago i didn’t even know what a puma was – except as a synonym for mountain lion – and after reading through the archives of various political blogs, i am now extremely frightened to be around my fellow liberals (pumas, “obots” and other assorted animals and androids), who must have swallowed some mercury or inhaled some lead. why are obama supporters and hillary supporters still fighting? that’s SOOOOOO last season.
care to educate me? WAIT. NO. DON’T educate me. i don’t wish to invite a barrage of batshittiness. i would rather exist in a bubble of ignorance.
i think i may just have to hang out with jon swift’s ilk. mercy!
January 8th, 2009 at 11:12 pm
You aren’t familiar with British slang, clearly. To “take the piss out of [something]” is to mock, ridicule, scoff at, etc. I am sorry you are unfamiliar with a fairly common phrase that occasionally does cross the pond. So, nice try to manipulate that into name-calling, but I will let you keep that in your orbit. Thanks.
Here, for your education: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taking_the_piss
You can go ahead and assume why Wonkette does what it does, but having been a daily (and more often than that) Wonkette reader for about two and a half years now, I will disagree with your assumption.
January 8th, 2009 at 11:19 pm
How is that cheating? Where did the editors say, “Go, use this cheat” and direct to the post, or explain how to do it? Where are the editors advocating something contrary to the written rules? Where? You still didn’t point out where the editors advocated cheating. also, that comment was posted on a thread late at night, and if I recall, it reached over 700 comments, though that may be the next day’s thread. Wonkette’s comments are usually only moderated heavily if something is brought to their attention, so there will be a delay before a comment gets deleted/account banned. The comment being deleted because it was brought to their attention as being about cheating is a valid interpretation based upon the available evidence. Simple Occam’s Razor here.
You just simply disagree with their reasoning for endorsing a blog. Hell, someone could go and vote for a blog because they like the pretty background color – does that mean their vote should be excluded? Nothing in the rules says it is wrong, just like nothing in the rules says it is wrong for a blog to endorse another blog on the basis of a name.
January 8th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
starting to regret commenting on this in the first place (too many emails!)
can we just forget all of this and focus on what is important?: GRACE THE SPOT IS DA BOMB! that is all!
January 9th, 2009 at 12:08 am
I… I just like lesbians. I just wanted to look at pretty women in tank tops… And now… now I have Ludacris stuck in my head and am confused by blog politics!
January 9th, 2009 at 1:08 am
Grace, you really should be in the humor category. You know how good things sometimes come from crappy things? Yeah i know it’s rare. REALLY rare. But I really read your blog every day now.
January 9th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
Aw, grace….I’d start voting for you know because I feel bad and want to make it up to you, but wouldn’t I still be a ho and trading Johns? Deep, burning questions.
Still, you have a fine blog here. Quite sturdy, IMHO.
January 9th, 2009 at 8:24 pm
No, no you don’t want that level of batshittiness!
Anyway, for whatever it’s worth, I am planning on reading much more of your blog. Because the name is super cool.
January 9th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Grace, this was a hell of a fine post, and is–dare I say it–full of what I’m told kids these days call “teh win.” I for one will gladly encourage all my fellow Wonketteers to start whoring for you.
January 10th, 2009 at 1:24 am
Wow! This became quaite a discussion and even Uppity Woman
has scolded me for, hmm, breaking the resolution on your sidebar:
“I will not be overly competitive about things that don’t matter.”
Sorry, Uppity, but this mattered to bloggers (and their fans) that were starting out.
I agree with her that you have a great blog here and I sense lots of humor. You could be in a number of categories, but take this to the bank= You definitely are one of the best new blogs.
So there.
January 10th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
Arguably this whole controversy will have a beneficial outcome for all the blogs in question. Imagine if Wonkette just ignored the contest altogether I really don’t think I would have discovered all these blogs.
Thanks Wonkette!
January 10th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
I heard they all like buttsecks and trucknutz!!1! Also, pushing buttons and envelopes.
January 12th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
I think that you’re doing a good job with this, though, Grace Chu!
The point of the Weblog Awards, for me, is to draw attention from random parts of the blogosphere and increase readership. We did it last year and we’re getting more people’s attention this year. I’m sure you’ve gotten a few hits out of this too.
The contest isn’t really about the best blog, it’s about the best GOTV effort in each category. And we’ve been doing a fairly good job with that in the LGBT category, coming up, between the 10 blogs there, with some pretty crazy ideas to get people to click that link.
I hadn’t even heard of Grace the Spot before this competition, and probably wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for all this drama. I hope that others found new reading material for the first time and increased readership here, because that’s the point of the awards. I know I did… both!